1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to traceability of failures blamed on hardware, and traceability of functional requirements from software.
2. Description of the Background Art
In recent years, it has become increasingly significant for manufacturers and sellers to ensure traceability of their own manufactured and sold products. For example if adequate traceability of sold products is not provided at the occurrence of a failure in their own manufactured and sold products, manufacturers and sellers cannot identify the range of influence of the failure without delay and thus cannot take speedy action such as issuing an alert to users of defective products or withdrawing defective products.
In manufacture and sales of software-installed computer devices, ensuring traceability of sold products is also important. For example, when a failure such as a bug is found in software installed in computer devices, it will be difficult to speedily identify the range of influence of that failure (that is, to speedily identify which computer devices will be affected by the failure) if traceability is not provided. This can cause serious damage.
Now, some failures in software occur under certain hardware conditions (for example, a failure occurring only with a specific type of CPUs, or a failure occurring only at a memory size of a predetermined value or less). For such failures, it is necessary to keep hardware information for each computer device in order to identify the range of influence of the failures with accuracy.
Some software (for example, software necessitating a specific CPU or a memory size of a predetermined value or more for proper functioning) requires certain hardware conditions for execution of instructions or the like described therein. For such functional requirements from software, it is again necessary to keep hardware information for each computer device in order to identify devices which satisfy the functional requirements.
Conventionally, such a structure has been employed that a model number is given to each type of hardware and is used for management of hardware information, whereby traceability of computer devices is ensured. In such a management method, for example when a failure occurring only with a specific type of CPUs is found in software, the type of a CPU in a computer is identified by the model number of the computer, and it is determined whether or not the computer is affected by that failure (for example, such a method is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 10-83322).
However since computer device hardware generally includes components that can be modified or added, the hardware configurations of computer devices are not always in their initial states (i.e., in the state of device configuration defined by the model number) and can be dynamically modified from the initial states. Specifically, in the case of modification or addition to hardware components of a computer device (for example, exchange of a CPU or motherboard, or memory expansion), the actual hardware configuration of that computer device does not match the hardware configuration defined by the model number.
Accordingly, the conventional methods of managing hardware information by using the model number no loner provide proper traceability of devices whose hardware configurations have been subjected to modification or addition. Therefore, it is impossible either to properly identify the range of influence of a failure or to properly identify hardware that satisfies functions required by software.